Refusing Human Rights Police Partnerships

Human rights institutions play a significant but frequently neglected role in determining how the problem of anti-Black racism and policing is represented and what measures are deemed necessary to address it. The institutional distance between human rights institutions and the police themselves is an informative gauge through which to examine the contribution of human rights policy towards enhancing external monitoring of, and accountability for, racism in policing. By examining the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s (OHRC) partnership arrangements with municipal policing services in Ontario, the author demonstrates how a lack of institutional distance risks enabling anti-Blackness within Ontario policing to go unchallenged by the human rights system. Yet, despite a sustained preference for partnerships, the commission has also demonstrated the institutional capacity to say, “Nah,” to policing narratives that deny the existence of racial profiling and seek to rebrand existing policing practices as human rights compliant. By exploring the OHRC’s interventions into racism and policing in the context of the Canadian human rights system and an inequitable racial order, this article offers insights into if and how human rights law and policy can contribute to transformative anti-carceral alternatives.